How Team Building Benefits Your Business
In many companies, individuals are often appointed for their technical ability rather than their interpersonal skills. Communication, motivation, negotiation, and listening skills can be overlooked as part of the recruitment process. The failure of teams to function successfully can often be attributed to a lack of these softer skills on the part of members of the team, particularly those in management or leadership positions. In today’s business environment, it can be that employees do not actually meet other members of their team or see them infrequently making it difficult to strike up and maintain successful business relationships. Homeworking, offices located at multiple premises, and on-the-road roles can all contribute resulting in isolation for an individual and a lack of feeling like part of a team. This isolation can also make it difficult for individuals to focus on the overall aims of a business rather than their own personal goals and targets. The purpose of team building is to overcome these obstacles to business success. Team building seeks to draw out the individual strengths of employees and bring them together into a coherent whole so that business objectives can be realised. At a basic level team building is about getting to know and understand co-workers. By building relationships communication improves, the workplace becomes more enjoyable and motivation is higher. Those participating in team-building learn more about their own strengths and weaknesses and the strengths and weaknesses of their co-workers. As a result, individual strengths can be utilised in the workplace, leading to increased productivity. So what exactly is team building? Team building can encompass a wide range of activities designed to develop participants’ ability to work together successfully. There is often the use of games for team-building activities. Sometimes children’s games are used, sometimes more complex games, designed with specific tasks in mind. Team building games can take place over a period of time, at one-day events or over several consecutive days. There is no one set way in which team building should take place. Exercises should be appropriate to the individual needs of a business. Team building games generally relate to specific skill sets. Successful teams need to be able to communicate, make decisions, plan effectively and trust each other and it is around these areas that the exercise usually focus. Sessions are usually run by trained facilitators to ensure focus and flow to exercises. A team-building game can be very simplistic, such as a social activity designed to get employees talking to one another. It may be centered around personal development, for example, physically challenging or adventure activities such as treasure hunts or learning a sport. Team building can seem excessive particularly when it comes to small businesses. All businesses, however, whatever their size need to have a shared direction of where they are heading and what needs to be done to achieve this. Team building can actually be exceptionally valuable to smaller businesses as organizations with fewer employees tend to have roles with very specific accountabilities and little overlap. This can lead to a lack of focus on the overall objectives of such organizations, in an environment where there is little margin for error. So what results should a business expect to see after investing time, money, and effort in team building? When using good exercises and games team building has benefits for both the business and the individual. At a fundamental level, a successful team-building event should lead to employees having a clearer understanding of business goals and direction. This is essential if everyone is to work together towards the same ultimate goal. Team building games are about enabling employees to successfully work together to achieve the aims of a business. Team building is not a one-off exercise, however, but a continual business need. Businesses are not static and operate in a constantly changing environment. Staff turnover, the economic environment, business relationships and changing customer needs all mean that teams need to be dynamic and able to evolve to meet the many challenges that they will encounter. From start-up businesses to mature organizations, a company’s best assets are those that it employs. For a business to be successful all employees should be working towards the same goal. To do this competition between different parts of an organization needs to be eliminated. Employees need a sense of ownership of their own role and need to understand how it interacts with others, working collaboratively towards defined objectives. It is only by everyone, whatever their role, actively participating in developing a business that it can truly flourish.
How Talent Management Produces Effective Leaders through Performance Management
The first phase in talent management or in other companies, also known as succession planning defined as a strategic method to attract, retain and develop highly skilled individuals to serve your company is leadership consultancy. It is basically the process of identifying characteristics, traits and qualities or the exact criteria for the attributes that should make up your desired leader. This allows for creating the ideal model or framework for leadership that is aligned with your company goal, vision and mission. The second phase is leadership audit wherein the goal is to amass collective data about the existing effectiveness of your current leaders to gain insight on how they have had impact on your company, as well as identifying areas for improvement. This is used to measure effectiveness, performance, alignment, capability and value for money to be used as a comparative study against studies from other companies giving you a clearer insight in how you can improve the structure of you current leadership model. The next phase is leadership assessments and benchmarking where the aim is to focus on the capabilities of an individual, measuring the ability to lead with the help of their amassed knowledge, background experience, learned management skills and high-performance behaviors, and on preferences of an individual where personal characteristics, traits, values and motivations influence their methodology on leadership. This again is collective data across you organization to be comparatively analyzed against successful organizations to help boost the success of your company taking it to the next level. The next phase is the use of assessment and development centers based on a theoretical model in helping your leaders through learning and accreditation. Based on solid research it aims to tackle the complex relationship between behaviors and performance such as negative effects of behavior and differentiation between behaviors and its impact on your organization. These also include but are not limited to, workshops and courses on leadership skills, development toolkits, coaching and development toolkits, top team development and leadership coaching focusing on skill development coaching, transitional coaching, career coaching, executive coaching and performance coaching. Participants are usually asked to spend time going through this training until they have received their accreditation. This of course may be costly but is a necessary investment if you are serious about influencing a great change within your company. The last phase is the most crucial to a future leader and given the utmost importance by a talent management team, performance management, because affecting change does not come naturally to some and usually involves a greater emotional aspect than an intellectual one. A leader’s efficiency is based on his ability to influence favorable outcomes which is always going to be dependent on the performance of his department. The only way effective leadership is measured is through seeing his performance, the results. There are two organic key factors that can immensely influence performance, motivation and environment. Motivation is essential in driving results because it is an innate drive to improve one’s self. It is vital that the leader knows his employees on a personal so he can create an approach tailor-fit for every individual personality so he can better gear them towards a goal. There are different forces that drive motivation in every person and it is a leader’s responsibility to use that as a tool for improvement. In the same way, it helps define the preferences in their working environment. An employee who feels comfortable with his office environment does not need coaxing to do better. He enjoys his job and the company of his co-workers as well. As a result there will be need for minimal supervision in driving results once positive reinforcement has been implemented. Prepare your future leaders today.
Healthy Mindset Habits for Entrepreneurial Success
So, we have discussed the fact that your mindset is the most important factor when it comes to achieving success. You also should have identified some of your strengths and a few of your weaknesses. So where do you go from there? The very next step is to start yourself on the path to healthy mindset habits. Habits are a funny thing. Your habits are things that you do without even thinking about them. Each morning (hopefully), you get up, brush your teeth and take a shower. You do these things without thinking too much about them. You can be worried about something at work, dwelling on a personal issue or even deeply engrossed in a great novel and the subconscious part of your brain will still nudge you every morning until you jumped in the shower and brushed your teeth or completed whatever other morning routines that you have. So, should be quite obvious that habits are one of your biggest assets when it comes to being successful. The people who are successful in this world are the people who developed the right habits. They don’t have to think about doing things that make them successful; they just get up every morning and do them, which of course, gives them the results that they want in the long run. In this chapter were going to discuss how you can create habits that will allow you to change your mindset from a negative, self-destructive one to a healthy mindset that is ready for success. Start Your Day with Positive Affirmations Have you heard the term self-talk? Self-talk could be more accurately described as internal memo-ing, or the constant communication between your conscious mind and your subconscious mind. For people who are not having success, and in fact, are having problems, negative self-talk is likely the reason why. Their subconscious is telling their conscious mind all these negative things and that just reinforces the idea that they aren’t successful and are never going to be successful. You’re going to do something different. You’re going to wake up each and every day and give yourself positive affirmations. You’ve probably heard of these before and you may think they’re silly. That’s perfectly okay to think that they’re silly, but still do them because silly-sounding or not, positive affirmations actually do work. Remember that your subconscious mind is like a sponge. It soaks up information and then informs beliefs which then drive your thoughts and your thoughts control your actions. If you change a belief with positive affirmations, you will be changing your actions as well. Find a place where you can actually say your positive affirmations to yourself, where no one will overhear you and where it is something specific and meaningful that will say to your subconscious mind: “Hey! Pay attention!” For example, some people stand in front of a mirror so they can look themselves in the eye and say their affirmations. Some people want as much privacy as possible so they do it in their car on the way to work. It doesn’t matter how you do it, as long as you pick a place and a time that is meaningful to you and do it every day. Create a routine that will develop into a solid habit. Spend Time with Your Feelings When you do have doubts, try spending some time with yourself and taking a good, hard look at those feelings, to see where they are coming from. As mentioned, your behaviors today are the result of your thoughts which come directly from your beliefs. That means, if you are convinced that you’re going to fail, which you might be if you haven’t been able to attain success so far, then that belief is what is driving all of those other factors that is keeping you from success. What you can actually do, is when these doubts enter your mind, and you start thinking about all the ways that this could possibly go wrong, take a step back, and evaluate where the thoughts are coming from. Remember, just because your subconscious believes something to be true doesn’t mean it is. So rather than trying to push away these negative thoughts or avoid them, accept them and then work to eradicate them by finding out which belief is driving them. Spend Each Day Learning Something New You should never stop learning. No matter how much you know, there is always room for more information. Just as science discovers that the more that we figure out about the world around us in the universe, the more we realize that we don’t know; It works the same way with your learning as well. Spend a little time each and every day learning something new that is going to help you. You could read a motivational book. There are many different ones out there that are geared towards entrepreneurs and are written to give great advice from experts who actually have made a success out of entrepreneurship. You can find them at your local library or online in digital format. Books by Anthony Robbins, Stephen R. Covey, Dale Carnegie and Napoleon Hill are all great reads if you’re trying to motivate yourself and become more successful. There are many other places that you can find motivation. Go on YouTube during your free time and look for motivational videos if that’s more your style or you could even correspond via email with someone who is more successful than you, who could be your mentor of sorts. No matter how you get information, the point is, to keep learning and to devote some time each day to that learning. You don’t even necessarily have to read motivational or self-help books. You could do something that improves yourself like learning a new language or teaching yourself a new skill, or by studying a subject that you been interested in, relating to your business.
Encourage Leadership Training
One of the things that employers look for in their employees, apart from the standard abilities like being a team player, being flexible, being detail-oriented, possessing the right skills and qualifications as well as good work ethic, is the drive to learn more and become more. From time to time, you might feel like you’re simply a tiny cog in a bigger machine that isn’t even aware of your presence or understand the value of what you do, but there is someone who is keeping an eye on what you do and how you perform, and that person is usually your immediate boss. He or she is the one who sees your performance and your contributions to the team and is able to recommend you for a raise or a promotion as needed. Employers would do well to encourage skills development in their employees. This adds to their arsenal of skills, making them more valuable to the company and ensuring that their skills are used to benefit the company. One of the workshops employers must encourage their workers to take is leadership training. Some people might think that developing leadership qualities in employees could pose a threat to the current higher-ups since it sounds as though people will be groomed to usurp their positions. This isn’t the case at all. Leadership training simply means that companies will be able to have teams of workers who are all able to take charge and have a thorough understanding of what it takes to make a company run smoothly. Encouraging leadership training in employees also means that employees have a chance for advancement, keeping them on their toes and helping them exercise their potential in their careers. Leadership training is not something that should be restricted solely to the heads of a company, although it would benefit them in the event that they forget what true leadership is about, help them reassess their progress and figure out where they may be going wrong, and allow them to be more sensitive to the needs of their workers. Everyone who is willing should have a shot at leadership training, especially since it will not only improve their outlook on their jobs and their skills but also allow them to make use of it in their lives. Keep in mind that leadership training is not just about creating the future heads of the company and it certainly doesn’t mean that participants will be actively angling for currently occupied top positions. It offers people a chance for advancement and self-improvement, and employers should recognize that having a team of highly skilled and effective with leadership abilities is much preferable to having workers who are skilled but possess a drone-like mentality.
Develop a Company Culture to Improve Sales
With as much competition as there is in the marketplace, businesses must find a way to market themselves that will help them to stand out from the other companies in the industry. One way to do this is to develop a company culture that customers can identify with. Many people like to feel as though they belong to something. When they know a company and its history and vision and they identify with the company in some way, they come to feel like they know the company and can trust it. A customer is more likely to give their hard-earned money to a business they view as a trusted friend and neighbor than a faceless corporation. Trust is an important part of the equation that leads a customer to choose a company to patronize. They want to trust that you know what you are doing, that you will not overcharge them and that you will give them a quality product they need. A company that freely educates the consumer without laying on a heavy sales pitch will win the trust of consumers and their business as well. This form of marketing is not difficult to do, yet it is highly effective. Sharing your Company Culture with the Marketplace Your company probably already has its own culture, with certain beliefs and philosophies on how things should be done and how customers should be treated. Are you sharing this with your customers? Think of the commercials for the cereal company where the employees are talking about their favorite cereal. They all seem to be having a great time making it that the viewer feels good about patronizing the company and buying the cereal. The buyer wants to be a part of that culture. There are other parts of your company culture you may want to share with customers and potential customers. One is the story of how you came to found your business. Stories of how Microsoft and Apple started continually circulate. Not only does this give consumers that sense of belonging, but every time the story is told, the company gets a free advertisement. Does your company have a vision? If not, it is time to come up with one. Not only do you need one to keep your company focused and your employees on track with where you want the company to go, but your customers like to hear about your vision as well. If written well, your vision statement can be powerful, inspiring and something consumers want to be a part of. The marketplace is too competitive to continue doing business the way it was done thirty years ago. Every company must stand out if it is to truly succeed, and developing a company culture your customers want to be a part of is an excellent way to do just that.
A leader – simply put!
The question of what is leadership has received an inordinate amount of airplay. Everyone accepts that it is a critical dimension of organizational growth. Ongoing leadership development often referred to as leadership training, is critical. Unfortunately, the higher in the organization we go, the less often we undertake formal development. There is a myriad of reasons for this – some very self-soothing! While we should continue to seek ongoing development and training, perhaps what is most important is that we remind ourselves of the key essentials of leadership. In searching for the right leadership recipe, we can often be overloaded with messages about what we need to do more/better/less to be an effective leader. Often we fall into the trap of doing for doings sake and, playing the role of the leader that is forged by the environment around us rather than what made us a good leader in the first place. Perhaps we need to firstly look at the core character attributes that provide the fertile ground for good leadership to grow. I recently read through the Hippocratic Oath – the oath where doctors pledge to undertake ethical medical practice. Perhaps not so surprisingly, since first written by Hippocrates in the 4th Century BC, it has been translated and ‘modernized’ a number of times. Regardless of this, at its core, any interpretation of the oath infers that practitioners must … ‘do no harm’. If the essence of leadership is the power of influence, then you can understand that its use and misuse can have long-lasting effects. Taking a lead from the medical fraternity, do no harm has a certain core principled-centered base that may guide our actions as leaders. Similarly, I once heard a leader talk about his personalized version of principled-centered leadership. In testing a decision or action that impacted people, his first test was to objectively answer his own question – is this fair to all concerned? But it is his second test on which he places most importance – simply put, if a decision or action he took was to make the front page of the newspaper, could he comfortably look his children in the eyes and explain it. In these current economic times, cost management practices such as retrenchments have become more prevalent. Certainly, for the sake of the long-term viability of the organization and its employees, they may be necessary at times. However, in keeping our oath or the front-page test, it will be how we treat people throughout these processes that separate true leaders from pretenders! So whenever we seek to be better leaders, firstly look within to see if we have the central requisites. By working from these, we will be better positioned to be the leader we want to be.
Yes! You Really Can Launch That Dream Start-Up Business
They say that all of us have a book in us but it’s also true that all of us have an idea in us. Nearly everyone will have at some point had an idea for a business, for a product, for an app, or for a service. We all have ideas that we think could make money, maybe even have a positive impact on the world.The problem is that we don’t have the know-how to make it happen, or the time. Or the money. So, the question then, is how you take that chance and how you build a business even if you don’t just so happen to have a ton of experience, financial backing and all the right contacts. Let’s take a look at what you need to do… Start Now! The first thing to do, is to start your business right now. Too many of us mistakenly make the assumption that we need to quit our current jobs and then put all of our resources, time and effort into our businesses. It’s ‘all or nothing’ and there’s no way you can start a business half-heartedly… Except that’s not true. In fact, there’s no reason that you can’t start your business in the evenings and weekends. Even if you just start a ‘shell’ of your business, it’s better to test that the idea has legs before you invest a lot of time and money into it. Start a website in the evenings, start buying and selling shirts in small quantities with a small budget. Just start now and only once you know you can earn a full-time salary do you need to consider quitting your current job. Bootstrap Another reason a lot of people hold themselves back from starting a dream business is that they don’t have the funds that they believe they need. If you’re planning on selling a product you invented for example, then you will probably make the assumption that you need to invest in a large order (called the MOQ – Minimum Order Quantity) to start. In fact though, you can once again get by without doing that. One way around the problem is to start your business with two revenue streams, or maybe three. Find a way to start raising capital through your other services or products and then only once you’re making more money do you invest into R&D or large bulk orders. For instance, you might sell a hand-made product and use that money to invest in manufacturing! Otherwise, you can also get funding in a range of other ways. How about Kickstarter? This way you can generate funds from the web and not even need to give away any of your equity! Or how about a PayPal loan which won’t impact on your credit score? Fail Fast Another tip is to create an MVP – or Minimal Viable Product – and to start trying to make money from it as soon as possible. This is simply a way to test your business model before you invest too much in it. Don’t make the mistake of investing in an idea that you have no proof will work and don’t put off getting your business up and running. You can refine once you’re live!
Why You Need to Create a Relationship Before You Sell
If you are selling products through a dropshipping business on eBay or if you’re selling a digital product as an affiliate, then it is absolutely crucial that you build a relationship with your potential customers before you try and sell to them. This is something that a lot of sellers and marketers just don’t understand and ultimately it is to their detriment as they end up missing out on the opportunity to sell. Read on to see exactly what this means and why it is so important… An Analogy… The best way to explain this is with an analogy, or two. Imagine for a moment that you see an attractive lady or man at a bar and you want to get to know them a little better. So what you do, is you go up and you ask if they’re come home with you tonight. What do you think happens next? Most likely you get a firm slap in the face – and this is more than fair enough! The problem with this approach is that the person doesn’t know you yet. They don’t know what you’re like and if they’re likely to have a good time with you and more importantly – they don’t know if they can trust you! You might be dangerous as far as they’re concerned! Another scenario is someone trying to sell a watch. Imagine they come up to you in the street holding a watch and ask if you want to buy it for $2,000. What do you say? Again, you’ll probably turn and run. No one would spend that much money on something without knowing anything about it and without having any form of ‘come back’ in case the deal turns sour. How Businesses Make This Mistake All the Time Both these examples probably seem absurd to you but this is essentially what many businesses are doing all the time. If you have a website that tries to sell a product as soon as anyone lands on it, then you’re going to drive people away before they have even had a chance to read your site. They may well be interested in what you’re selling but if they don’t know your brand and they don’t know your product, then they won’t want to buy right away. And if all you’re interested in doing is selling to them with tons of pop?up ads, then you’re going to drive them off – it will look like spam! Now consider the alternative approach: they land on your website and they find tons of great content that’s well written, free and informative. This allows the visitor to form a positive opinion of your business and hopefully to become interested in the products you’re mentioning. And as a result, they’re much more likely to want to buy from you in future. So instead of focussing on making a sale, focus on making a fan. Push them toward a mailing list instead and invite them to come back. That way, the sales will come to you!
What Makes a Good Franchisee?
Being a good franchisee takes about the same qualities as being a good business owner of any type. The difference between a completely independent owner and a franchisee is very small and only comes into play when dealing with the franchisor’s rules and ability to drive the direction of your business based on their vision rather than your own. Ability to be Consistent – Franchises come with standard operating procedures and processes. If you can consistently follow them, you will be successful. You’ll need to follow them and ensure your employees do the same. Flexibility – When you own any type of business, you must be ready and willing to jump through all sorts of hopes even when you are tired. One example is that you’ll likely have an alarm on your store if it’s a bricks-and-mortar franchise that might go off because the wind blows wrong. You’ll have to get up at 3 am and go turn it off and talk to the police about it. Good Communication skills – Not only will you need to be able to talk to your franchisor, but also your staff, and your customers. Not to mention the myriad of vendors that will service your location. But remember, communication is a two-way street and you’ve been given two ears and one mouth for a reason. Have Passion for the Industry – If you don’t like fast food, do not buy a fast food franchise. The only exception is if you have the type of funds to be an absentee owner and you’ll be hiring managers to oversee everything. But even then, why would you invest in things that don’t bring you joy? Honesty and Ethics – It’s imperative that you are very honest and have the utmost ethical center to be a franchisee. You’re going to have to be on your honor to follow a lot of the rules and regulations and systems that the franchisor sets out for you. You will be representing the business across the country and maybe the world. If someone comes into your place and has a bad experience, it rubs off on everyone. Leadership Ability – Even if the idea of leadership bothers you, remember that there are different types of leadership. Take the time to do the work to discover what type of leader you are. Once you understand your leadership style, you’ll be able to be who you are while you lead your staff and business to success. Organizational Skills – It can be hard to be organized, so don’t despair if you’re not naturally organized. You can hire people to come in and organize according to the franchisor’s rules, and sometimes they will help with that. Your job will be to maintain that organization. Anyone can learn organization if they make it a priority. Perseverance – You also need to be able to stick to it through the hard times (which could be one to three years from the date you sign the contract) before you see any money for your hard work. It may be frustrating; you’ll hit roadblocks, but if you stick to the plan you’ll see success. Even though you as a franchisee must follow the lead of the home office to drive profits, you’re still a business owner with all the risks and rewards that come with the privilege. Make no mistake; even though you’ve laid down your hard-earned money to become a franchisee, your ability to be successful will depend on your ability to understand the overall vision of the franchisor and go on to translate that into success for you and your community.
Top Ways to Create a Business Selling Physical Products
Selling a physical product has a ton of advantages over selling digital ones. While digital products have their benefits and have their place, nothing quite beats the broad appeal of selling something tangible that people can actually hold in their hands and use. The problem is that selling a physical product often requires a little more thought than going digital. In this post then, we’ll take a look at some surprisingly easy ways to start a business selling something physical. Let’s get physical! Selling Crafts One option is to sell crafts. If you have the ability to paint, to make jewelry, or to sculpt with clay, then you can turn that hobby into a money making venture – and if you’ve seen the Penny Blossom episode of Big Bang Theory then you’ll already know how this works. Simply create your product, take some photos for eBay or Etsy, and then sell them! It really is that easy – but make sure that the product you choose is something you can easily make in volume and that doesn’t have high CoGS (Cost of Goods Sold). Reselling Reselling is the oldest business model in the book. All you’re doing here is ordering large volumes of something at a relatively low price (this is called wholesale) and then selling those items off individually at a profit. Reselling is a very effective way to make money but involves a small amount of risk because you have to buy inventory. If you start small though, you can reinvest your profit and thereby create a fairly reliable business model. Affiliate Marketing Yes, you can sell physical products as an affiliate. And most people reading this will already know that that means getting commission on sales. The best place to find physical products to sell this way is to go to Amazon, where you can sell pretty much anything you can think of and through a site that most shoppers will already trust. Dropshipping Dropshipping is what many people consider to be the ‘ideal’ business model. This basically means you’re buying through wholesalers but you don’t have to put in bulk orders. Better yet, you don’t need to worry about fulfilment because the company will do that for you! All you need to do is to sell the products and then pass the details onto the wholesaler that will sell the product. Best of all, some companies will even stay quiet and allow you to take credit for the manufacturing! Selling Your Own Product Finally, you can sell your own mass?produced product. For most people, this will mean coming up with an idea, creating a 3D model and then going to manufacturers in order to get it made. There are different options today though. For example, how about creating your own book with POD (Print On Demand) publishing? Or you could use a 3D printer and print out simple plastic items this way. Today, it’s easier than ever to sell your own physical products. So what are you waiting for?
